Webarchitects celebrated 20 years of service to progressive organisations and individuals in 2018.

A brief history of Webarchitects

Webarchitects has had several legal forms since starting 20 years ago, for
the last seven we have been a co-operative.

The original decision to create Webarchitects was made after spending half a
day with Tony Benn, in his Holland Park basement, on 9th November 1997,
discussing the potential of the Internet for the Labour Movement.

We registered the first domain for a client before we registered our own
domain name; public.org.uk for the
Centre for Public Services. We developed and hosted their site at
www.centre.public.org.uk, and they remain a client to this day. The
latest version of their site, now running WordPress, can be found at european-services-strategy.org.uk.

In 2000 we launched our content management system, MKDoc and MKDoc hosting service. The
software, written in Perl, was ahead of
its time, allowing web based content editing, multi-lingual sites and the
automatic generating of things like RSS
and RDF metadata. Notable
MKDoc sites included Multikulti
which was a very early, fully UTF-8, multi-lingual site.

However we struggled financially and in 2004 the developer and one of our
founders left. We were unable to continue with MKDoc development, but instead we decided to GPL the codebase (releasing it as free software). We continued to host MKDoc
sites until late 2017 and they were still perfectly functional — a testament to the high quality of the code.

After some hard years following the loss of a major client, things started to
pick up with the hosting of the Transition Network in 2010. We
documented all our work for them on a Trac site
and hosted them until 2016.

In 2011 we relaunched as a co-operative (Webarch Co-operative Limited)
with a new Drupal site and logo, and moved into CADS at Snow
Lane, Sheffield. We started to rebuild the business, and in 2013 we merged with Ecohost
Co-operative and we continue to support their clients and services.

A major boost came in 2015, when we began hosting CRIN (Child Rights International Network), again documenting all our
work on a Trac site. By 2016 we had gone full circle with our website and it was once again
static HTML / SSI,
as it was in the beginning.

We now use Bash for scripts,
Ansible for server deployment, configuration and maintenance, and host our
code (much of it is public) on our Gitlab site at git.coop.

We moved into our current office at Harland Works on John Street, Sheffield,
in 2017, taking our nameplate and door bell with us.